Before I proceed – this is not a slam on Mike Dunaway, whose golf swing I think was awesome. I will be talking about theory vs execution here, just to be clear.
I spent years looking at, discussing and trying to replicate Mike Austin’s swing from the years 2009-13.
I tried to be very diplomatic when I left the camp, because most of my readers had come to my blog out of interest in Mike Austin and Mike Dunaway, but to my surprise, when I broke with the Austin school and went my own way, most of you stayed with me, which was great.
I had already come to the realization that something wasn’t right with the Austin/Dunaway swing models in the winter of 2012-13, which was when I decided to go back to building my own swing models as I had been doing before 2009 (trying to, at least), which was when I developed the “New MCS” swing model.
I later realized that it was the whole head-shifting thing, because I just couldn’t make myself swing in a manner that had my head shifting on the back pivot – for an athlete, it is too disorienting and must be drilled constantly to maintain, and I wasn’t going to do it for the sake of someone else’s swing model.
I had already been studying Moe Norman’s swing, where the big excitement about his model was how stable his head stayed during the swing motion. I remember someone drawing a circle around his head as you see me do now with myself and other swingers, and that stayed with me subconsciously even after I stopped trying to copy his swing.
The Problem With Austin & Dunaway’s Videos
Let’s skip on to when I began to look at Mike Dunaway’s swing again during the pandemic lockdowns – I had watched all of the videos but only during the time that I was in that school of swing, and I didn’t know half of what I’ve since learned, so I missed a lot of things.
When I started watching them again, I began to see issues that I couldn’t reconcile.
Then came the realization – I had always said that, in my eyes, Austin and Dunaway had distinctively different swing, which made watching any video presented by them problematic.
That realization was, “They aren’t even swinging according to the theoretical model Austin says is the perfect swing!”
Guess what the problem was?
It was the head shift!
Both Austin and Dunaway declared that the head shouldn’t shift – I agree whole-heartedly with this statement – and that their heads didn’t shift on the back pivot , but it flew in the face of what they actually did.
According to Austin’s theory, the stance was a centered stance, and the head was centered, and was supposed to remain stable and in place whilst the hips and legs performed a “ringing the bell” action of shifting to one’s trailing side on the back pivot, then to the leading foot on the down swing.
Let’s watch this video clip starting from 1:16:
Dunaway literally says at 1:55, “and my head’s not moving to the right at all!”
Now, look at Dunaway’s head in the clip at 3:17:
Is That A “Leaning A” Position, Sir?
His head is way to his right over the trailing foot, and it could never be there if it stayed centered in the stance, because the right foot hasn’t moved this entire time – so how does the head get over the trailing foot if it doesn’t move from center?
It can’t, of course, and there’s the problem – the execution isn’t matching the theory.
Then at 4:43, Dunaway states, “a two-foot balance to a one-foot balance – and I kept my head in the exact same position!“
Right at this time, here is what you’ll see in the video:
That’s the key, alright – but not how either Austin nor Dunaway swung.
It gets worse – here’s Dunaway shortly afterward describing his hip swinging, and again the head shifts considerably to over his trailing side from setup to the top of the back pivot:
… and then he incredibly asserts that at impact, his shoulders will be wide open at 5:32 of the video:
Uh, not a chance in the world that Dunaway had this open-shouldered impact position, as you can see even from his earliest video features:
You can’t get any more square than that, unless you invent new geometry, my friends.
Mike Dunaway – Setup vs Impact
At 6:20, Dunaway swings and hits a ball with savage power and speed, but where is his head at address and at the top?
He sets up right-biased, “Leaning A” style, and his head shifts even more right on the pivot to the top.
Mike Austin and Dunaway were great athletes – whether or not it were just through athletic instinct, they both moved their heads over the right side on the back pivot because that’s where it has to be at impact in a mechanically-correct swing action.
Here is where we have to be honest – Mike Dunaway swung the way Mike Dunaway swung, and it was nothing near what Mike Austin claimed was his swing model, and I was saying even when I was in that camp that their swings were different.
Even when Dunaway made his own videos, he always described it in the manner his mentor had, but when he was actually swinging, it wasn’t in that model.
He had a fabulous golf swing, but he never taught anyone how to swing that way, he just parroted the words of his mentor who sold a lot of videos making Dunaway his model.
WAX Golf 